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No, you clearly don't know who you're talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks!

not doing too ell in the chaos shrine, though, only unlocked Minwu and Cid

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No, you clearly don't know who you're talking to, so let me clue you in. I am not in danger, Skyler. I am the danger. A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks!

Started replaying Arkham City today. I've been in a Batman mood for several weeks. I still prefer Asylum over City, but this game is still a ton of fun. I can't wait for the next installment, though I've heard it's not going to be a continuation of this story, which kind of bums me out.

I am in the final stages of Psychonauts. I came to this rather late. I tried the demo years ago, wrote it off as a platformer (not my sort of game) with an interesting art style and didn't play it again.

I picked it up in a Humble Bundle and just as I did with Bastion, which was also in that Bundle (best Bundle ever!), found that my first impressions were way off.

Yes, it's a platformer, but it's an incredibly inventive, clever, surprising, touching and funny platformer. The art, dialogue and remarkable settings (from a board game to a Japanese horror film spoof to a conspiracy theorist's mind) make for an amazing experience. It's also possible to find a heck of a lot of extras if you go off the beaten path - all sorts of bonus cutscenes, extra dialogue and collectable objects.

The only downside is the sharp leap in difficulty in the final stages. After nearly being driven mad by the accursed confusion rats, now the infamous Meat Circus level is certain to result in a smashed controller - and this is apparently after it was made a lot easier in a patch!

Still well and truly worth it overall, even for someone who normally wouldn't play a platformer.

I've never been able to get into WRPGs, but I keep giving them second chances because I absolutely love the concept of the genre. My most recent attempt was The Witcher, but that didn't go too well. Hopefully Icewind Dale will be more to my tastes.

Nope, it sucked. $5 wasted, but that's not too bad. On the bright side I've finally discovered what turns me off from the genre.

I love the idea of WRPGs being about a party of adventurers exploring a fantasy land and I do love almost every WRPG that I play for the first few hours, but then I end up quitting in frustration. The problem is that I despise character customization, leveling up, and loot. At the early stages of the game you don't have to worry about this too much, but after a few hours you have to manage your inventory, invest skill points, and other boring stuff that is kinda inherent to RPGs that I don't like. If there was a WRPG where these RPG elements were streamlined to the same extent as they are in JRPGs so that the focus is on the plot/exploration rather than the loot/leveling I think I would enjoy it. Alas...

So instead of Icewind Dale I started playing the original Final Fantasy for the PSP. Way too many random battles, but it's still pretty fun. I've only ever made it to the Marsh Cave on the NES, so most of the game will be completely new to me.

Speaking of 13, I gather I'm about halfway through it, and I love it to death. Yes it's linear (so far), but the story and battle system more than make up for it. In fact I think this is one of the best battle systems I've ever seen. It's different from the early Final Fantasy games, but only in the way you approach the battle, I love that rather than focusing on who's doing what, you're focusing on keeping your characters healthy and what battle formation is the best one to use. The paradigm system really ups the strategy, in my eyes.

At the moment I'm beasting Far Cry 3, dipping in and out of The Testament of Sherlock Holmes and The Blackwell Saga (cracking series of indie adventure games and cheap as hell on Steam - if you have any nostalgia for 90s point and clicks, do yourself a favour and check them out)

Picked up a lot of games on the steam sale a while back, and have plowed through a few since. Bastion was surprisingly fun (a mix of things that shouldn't work well together - cheery old school graphics and weary grizzled narration - working well together), and Spec Ops: The Line was... unsettling. Bothered me a bit that a game set in Dubai focuses almost entirely on American characters, but that's part of its Heart of Darkness-inspired heritage - and the rest of it came off as a kind of angrily subversive take on the generic hero fantasy plot of a shooter. Quite unsettling and effective a gaming experience.

Pretty much my every other waking moment is Mark of the Ninja, though.

And hey, I got the X Series Box for 9.99! Now I just need a few economics degrees and I'll be able to understand how to play one of these bloody games...

Kelthaz wrote:

If there was a WRPG where these RPG elements were streamlined to the same extent as they are in JRPGs so that the focus is on the plot/exploration rather than the loot/leveling I think I would enjoy it.

A lot of WRPGs - and honestly, my favourites - have a heavy emphasis on plot. Most everything put out by BioWare, and the better recieved Obsidian Entertainment titles are indicative of this. I play their games pretty exclusively for the plot, and they're generally pretty good at providing games where I feel like I have impacted the plot in a meaningful way. There's also WRPGS that indulge heavily in exploration - that's usually Bethesda's thing what with Skyrim and Fallout 3 - but besides MMOs like Warcraft it's not a focus that appeals to me.

Hell, if anything, in Mass Effect 2 BioWare dropped most of the conventional RPG mechanics and honestly it was a better game mechanically than the often confused first entry in the series.

My issue with JRPGs... well on the one hand they're virtually exclusively console games and I'm a PC gamer, but also because the plots seem invariably terrible to an outsider from the genre. First and foremost I like RPGs with stories I like, so I stick to my comfort zone.

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'Spock is always right, even when he's wrong. It's the tone of voice, the supernatural reasonability; this is not a man like us; this is a god.'
- Philip K. Dick

As per usual I got the latest installment of Call of Duty and as usual it was entertaining in its over the top action and fast paced campaign. I really enjoyed the fact that they tried to do something different in CoD by adding choices that result in different endings. Also, the millimeter scanner is awesome.

I also started Far Cry 3 and it is great so far. I like being able to customize weapons now and all the collectibles to find. I prefer this kind of sand box play to the Elder Scrolls kind where it seems like there is too much to do. Too many quests and too much to collect. Far Cry 2 and 3 strike a balance of open exploration and a manageable amount of missions and collectibles.

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Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space.

A lot of WRPGs - and honestly, my favourites - have a heavy emphasis on plot. Most everything put out by BioWare, and the better recieved Obsidian Entertainment titles are indicative of this. I play their games pretty exclusively for the plot, and they're generally pretty good at providing games where I feel like I have impacted the plot in a meaningful way.

That's how I feel too. When I'm in the mood for an RPG I'm only truly interested in the story and characters. When I was younger RPGs used to be my favourite genre, but with a job I just don't have the patience to deal with the terrible pacing and inevitable padding. I have at most 1-2 hours to play games in the evening, so I want to accomplish more in an evening than configuring my party's equipment and killing some rats in the bar's basement. If that's all I do I feel like I wasted my whole night.